


The story cracks from side to side (and probably should)

by beer_good



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who (2005), Game of Thrones (TV), Twin Peaks
Genre: Gen, Meta, Storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-08 15:20:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6860530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beer_good/pseuds/beer_good
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cracks are what make a good story. Not crackfic, but cracks: That bit where a story made up of several different stories doesn't quite fit together seamlessly, and how that's not necessarily a bad thing. The inconcistencies and contradictions within the story are what give it life - as long as the storyteller is aware of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The story cracks from side to side (and probably should)

**This post contains spoilers for all aired episodes of _Doctor Who_ , _Buffy_ , _Angel_ and _Game of Thrones_ (the TV series) as of April 2012.**

So a while back, I was reading Russell T Davies' _The Writer's Tale_ , which if you haven't read it is recommended both for fans of _Doctor Who_ and for those interested in serial television and storytelling in general. And I say this despite the fact that it threw some of the things I dislike about RTD's writing style into even sharper contrast (and that I couldn't care less about his constant fanboying of _Skins_ ).

But the point I wanted to bring up, where something clicked into place, was this quote. _The Writer's Tale_ is essentially the (mostly) complete and uncensored e-mail and text correspondence between RTD and Benjamin Cook as RTD writes s4 of _Doctor Who_ , up until Stephen Moffat took over the show. This quote is from page 190-191, where RTD is trying to piece together the Christmas special "Voyage of the Damned", essentially _The Poseidon Adventure_ IN SPACE, and has trouble getting the narratives to play nice:

> _Davies:_  
>  _The funny thing is - and I learn this every time, yet forget it - if a fault is fundamental, any problem-solving is only papering over the cracks. The cracks always show. Faults persist. They always do. The disaster movie fights the essential nature of the Doctor, because he becomes just Any Old Survivor - a clever one, yes, the leader, yes, but a hapless victim of events. He's lacking. Now, when the plot turns and he changes ('No more!' he says), then he's in charge again and good old Doctor Who kicks in..._
> 
> _Cook:_  
>  _Well, isn't that true of the storytelling process full stop? If you're inventing something artificial, something false, and yet you're wanting to convince people that's [sic] it's real so that they can suspend their disbelief sufficiently, surely you're 'papering over the cracks' from the moment that you start writing?_
> 
> _Davies:_  
>  _I like your version of papering over the cracks. I'm going to cling to that. (...) You're right, most stories require the writer to wallpaper like crazy, especially those stories that demand so many suspensions of disbelief. (...) I am a wallpaperer. Yes, that's what I am._

  
Now, here's the thing. What's the first we see of the massive two-season arc that starts in the very first episode of Moffat's _Doctor Who_ , right there in the bedroom of the girl who'll eventually narrate the Doctor back into existence? Well... this:

This is simplified, but still, I thought the synchronicity here was beautiful: RTD sees his job as a writer as papering over the cracks, hoping we won't notice the inherent flaws; Moffat, instead, bases his entire story around the cracks, the conflicts that arise when different narratives _don't_ fit smoothly together. Where the Doctor isn't either a madman in a box or a lonely god carrying the weight of the universe, but both and neither - and where the story of him is inseparable from his actual person.

And then I thought a bit more about it and wondered, well, isn't that where most of the serial fiction I love comes from, to some extent? Intersecting narratives that collide rather than mesh, forcing the characters to constantly check themselves and the plots to take turns they couldn't in a well-wallpapered story. It's not about characters that have friction; it's about entire _stories_ having friction. You take a couple of entirely different stories - say, a family-oriented sci-fi story about a magical man, a story of a young woman trying to figure out what she wants from life, and a philosophical story about the limits of power and paternalism and and and... Well, there are going to be cracks when you try to make them all fit together. And those cracks must be allowed to matter; if you pretend they don't, and that it's all one story without inherent contradictions... well, you could find yourself needing to push a reset button every few episodes.

To take the Buffyverse; _Buffy_ (much like its distant older cousin _Twin Peaks_ ) is a fundamentally weird series, a high school soap opera with musings on morality and free will etc set within a somewhat shlocky 80s horror movie. These are stories that shouldn't easily mesh, and often don't (often even in ways the writers didn't intend) - and that _is_ the story, Buffy trying to balance everyday life with saving the world, and even being self-aware enough to _notice_ that those stories don't seem to fit together. A huge amount of deciding moments in these series happen in alleys, sewers and corridors, in the darkness that lies between the well-lit streets and hallways of the stories we know. That's where Liam meets Darla and Drusilla meets William, that's where Buffy meets Angel and Spike, that's where Willow and Tara meet in "Restless" (and where Willow finds Rack), that's where Connor is born, it's where Spike's and Buffy's roles blur in "Dead Things", it's where Faith becomes a murderer, it's where the _Angel_ team find themselves cornered in the last shot of the series... In a world of fixed narratives, where we know the seven basic plots by heart, where every character (the Cheerleader, the Monster, the Nerd, the Wise Man, the Hero, the Sidekick) have their fixed roles, the only place they can go to find power to change their roles is outside of the narrative. In the cracks.

 _Angel_ both suffers and succeeds in this - much like RTD would complain, it's a fundamentally faulty show. On the one hand, you have the narrative of the atoning hero saving damsels in distress, saving the world, saving puppies, and generally being an upstanding hero to make up for being naughty. Which, at times, was clearly what the show was supposed to be.

> _JOSS WHEDON: The hardest [to write] was always Angel. How to make a decent, handsome, stalwart hero interesting -- tough._

On the other hand, you have the story that shows through the cracks: the deeply flawed guy who started out as a "drunken whoring layabout", became a complete monster, and fled from that into an angst-ridden existentialist character struggling every moment of his unlife to _not_ be what his nature tells him to be, tends to view everyone else as reflections of his own issues, makes some pretty objectionable decisions for others, and occasionally makes HUGE mistakes... and who knows, deep down, that nothing he ever does will actually compensate for what he did. Basically, there's a lot more Captain Hammer in Angel than the above quote seems to say.

> _ANGEL: It's not the demon in me that needs killing, Buffy. It's the man._

That friction between the two stories is the entire point of the show, which is what makes it both a frustrating and fascinating story. Frustrating because, inevitably, when the writers invite you to look into that ~~abyss~~ crack, you occasionally see more of it than they intended. I'm not saying that writing this sort of story is easy. But arguably, Angel himself also suffers and succeeds in this. It's (often) when they get locked into _one_ narrative, when they become sure of themselves or caught up in their own selfishness or are forced to play _one_ game, that things go to hell. Because they try to pretend that you can just pick one of the stories and live in that one. And you know what happens when you step on a crack.

> _SPIKE: There's a hole in the world. Feels like we ought to have known._

You see the same in-story disconnect between stories in some other TV series in recent years, too. _Game Of Thrones_ is a great example (I haven't read the books, so **NO SPOILERS** beyond what's been on screen, please, but feel free to laugh at my no doubt very funny speculations). Here we have two (OK, more than two, but just for the sake of argument here) completely different narratives: on the one hand, the classic Tolkienesque (o hi there, Sean Bean) fantasy of virtuous knights, fair maidens and honourable battles, where the story comes with the assumption that Good will eventually prevail and the Rightful King will be restored; and on the other a harsh, cynical _realpolitik_ -y story about sneaky people stabbing each other in the back. These stories not only don't mesh, they actively clash. Those who only see the former narrative (Ned Stark, Sansa Stark, Viserys Targaryen, Khal Drogo) seem doomed to be crushed, imprisoned or swept out of the way by the more pragmatic characters, with the words "honour", "right" and "glory" on their lips until the very last. Not surprisingly, many of those charactes are dead or sidelined by the end of s1.

> _ANGEL: People who don't care about anything will never understand the people who do._  
>  _HAMILTON: Yeah, but we **won't care**._

However, those who only see the latter narrative (Littlefinger, Maester Pycelle, to some extent most of the people at court) find themselves stuck in a game of _The Wire_ -like perpetual maneuvering that comes with the assumption that nothing ever changes... which means they never actually _get_ anywhere, that any success will be fleeting, and that they'll constantly have to fear crossing the wrong person.

The power, it would seem, _should_ shift to those who know the value of _both_ narratives and can manipulate and draw strength from both of them; the likes of Daenerys Targaryen, Tyrion Lannister, Catelyn Stark. What it means for those who seem to _reject_ both (Arya Stark, for instance) remains to be seen.

The point of that isn't "honour triumphs over cynicism". The point of it is that both idealistic stories and cynical ones have strengths; any character who manages to reshape their own story into one that borrows from both is going to be able to reshape the story at large to serve them rather than trap them. Kind of like Amelia Pond, the girl who waited, and in uniting the impossibly non-mixy storylines (childhood dreams and adult mundanity, domesticity and adventure) managed to _force_ the entire world to give The Doctor back.

Of course, it's not without risks. That crack has swallowed mighty cynics and romantic dreamers alike; ask Rory Pond, he knows what happens if you die in real life. Anyone who goes into that alley can find themselves caught in it with dragons soaring overhead. The trick is to get into the crack between the stories, get what you came for, and come out stronger.

Not that trying to wallpaper over some issues is necessarily a bad thing, either. Cook has a good point that this is what all storytellers do, to some degree. But if the cracks in the supporting walls get too deep, no amount of wallpaper is going to keep it standing.

 _Ring the bells that still can ring._  
_Forget your perfect offering._  
 _There is a crack in everything._  
 _That's how the light gets in._  
\- Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written in April 2012.


End file.
